


Component Parts

by rosa_acicularis



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-04-18
Updated: 2011-05-02
Packaged: 2017-10-18 08:10:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/186782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_acicularis/pseuds/rosa_acicularis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nyota Uhura, from the beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

She’s up to her elbows in a damaged transporter console when the Romulan ship emerges from the darkness.

The Kelvin explodes with sound, hundreds of panicked voices chattering on every channel, and she almost misses Lieutenant Mirsky shouting her name over the comm. “Nyota! I swear on my blessed mother’s shiny glass eye, if you do not get your skinny ass to Engineering—”

She drops her tools and slams out of the transporter room, flipping her comm open as she runs. “Mirsky, you know I’m a married woman. Keep your eyes off my ass.”

He chuckles, but she can hear the fear in it. “Yes, yes, I am tormented by our forbidden love, I will slit my wrists as soon as the big scary ship has finished blowing me to teeny tiny pieces. Now would you please—”

The first blasts from the Romulan ship breach the warp drive. She hears Mirsky’s scream before the channel goes silent.

After that, it’s all she can do to put out the fires. Extensive damage to levels seven through thirteen, hull integrity compromised on levels fourteen and fifteen, and the casualties – she pushes it away, narrows her vision until there is only the task in front of her _(forgetting her scorched hands, and the smell)_ and it is the last ten minutes of her life, but she does not panic. She does not falter. Commander Kirk calls for evacuation and she knows _(the circle of fire closing around her)_ that she will not be leaving.

She hums a little Johnny Cash under her breath as she works, because it’s appropriate to the situation and would annoy the crap out of Hasan if he knew. Hasan, with his shameless musical snobbery and bushy eyebrows and the half-empty cups of cold tea he leaves around the house. She’ll never see him again.  

Hasan will raise a motherless daughter. He can’t even heat a bowl of soup.

Nyota’s hands still. Her little girl is three years old and her mother is as real to her as the Tooth Fairy, as the face on the screen in her weekly vid messages home. She’s left her daughter a name and nothing more.

The next attack breaches the hull, and suddenly the fire is gone, vanished into darkness. For a moment it is shockingly, blessedly cold, and then there is nothing.

She dies with her daughter’s name on her lips.      

++

The mid-day sun has passed, and outside the house the afternoon shadows grow long, stretching into evening. But even in shadow the air is close and thick, and inside the house the environmental systems whine in the lingering heat. Uhura removes the control unit’s casing and sets to work on the tangle of wires.

Her father’s leather chair creaks as he leans back, his shoeless feet propped up on the desk. There is a hole in the toe of his left sock. “Be still, _mpendwa_. I am exhausted just looking at you.”

She shakes her head. “It’ll only be a minute,” she says around the screwdriver in her teeth. It falls, clattering to the floor, and she licks the sour metal taste from her mouth. “Anyway, you’ll feel better once I get this working again.”

He makes a low, displeased sound. “I feel perfectly fine. Don’t fuss.”

She grins at him over her shoulder. “I would never.”

He holds his sweat-damp handkerchief to his forehead, striking a dramatic pose. “Lying, disobedient child! I shall suffer your insolence no longer.” He drops the handkerchief onto the desk; it lands on a slowly collapsing stack of sheet music. “As my only progeny, you may as well know - I intend to run away and join the circus.”

“You wouldn’t,” Uhura says. “Not now that the department’s finally given you tenure.”

Her father leans forward, elbows resting on his bony knees. The sun gleams gold in the study’s bay windows, turning his white-grey hair to a halo. “They would appreciate me at the circus,” he says, his lined face solemn.

She nods. “Of course they would. You can play ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ on the piano with your toes.” She screws the unit’s casing back into place, then presses the button marked _Power_. Cool air floods the study.

Her father sits back in his chair and sighs, his hand swaying back and forth as if the jets of air were music and he their conductor. “When you smile like that,” he says, “you look just like your mother.”

Uhura falters, almost raising her hand to her lips. “Do I?”

“Oh yes,” he says. “I never met a woman with a smile so smug.”  

She laughs and crosses the room to sit in the worn wooden chair in front of the desk, where her father had taught her to read and write Swahili and English and Latin, where she’d listened to his lectures on music theory and composition and the insufferable stupidity of the average university student. It is a good chair; her fingers grip its arms as she smiles. “Right. Because you’re the very picture of humility.”

He chuckles. “And what, exactly, does a man of my caliber have to be humble about?” He pauses, and his smile fades. He rubs his fingers over his mouth, watching her. “My love, you have something to tell me.”

Her grip on the arm of the chair tightens, her fingernails scratching against the wood. “You already know what I’m going to say.”

He nods. 

Uhura raises her chin and takes a steadying breath. “Father, I’m not going to finish my doctorate at the university.”

There is a silence. “I assume you’ve received a better offer,” he says finally.

“Yes.” She swallows. “I’ve been accepted into the xenolinguistics doctorate program. In four years I should make officer and get my first assignment.” She pulls the acceptance letter from her pocket, unfolds it and lays it on the desk in front of him. “It’s an excellent opportunity.”

She half expects him to flinch at the sight of the insignia on the letterhead; it wouldn’t be the first time. Instead he nods, slowly. “You’ve enlisted in Starfleet.”   

“Yes,” she says. 

He looks away from her, staring unseeing out the window. The sky is a pure, fierce blue, deepening at the horizon. Visible over the small copse of acacia trees is the waxing moon, three-quarters full and pale against the clear evening sky. “Good,” he says. “You would be wasted anywhere else.”

Her eyes go wide. “Father—”

He stands, his long legs unfolding before he walks to the gramophone in the corner of the study. His fingers brush the brass-lipped mouth of the horn. “Your mother built this for me,” he says. “She spent years looking for the right parts, making them herself if she couldn’t find an antique component that would fit. She finished it not long before you were born.” He cranks the handle on the side, and the record begins to spin. He lifts the needle, and when he sets it down again the music starts.

It is _Clair de Lune_ , of course.

Her father steps away from the gramophone, watching the turn of the record. “Debussy’s _Suite Bergamasque_ ,” he says. “Third movement.”

_I know_ , she almost says. She’s spent her entire life listening to her father’s music. The music he writes, the music he plays. The music he teaches, the music he loves. It is his mathematics, his action and reaction, the star he seeks in the night sky. Her father calls her his beautiful girl with the beautiful ear, and it is true – she can hear what others cannot, and that has always made her precious in his eyes. But they both know that her talents are not his. 

She rises from her chair and stands beside him, resting her chin against his shoulder. “ _Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur_ ,” she recites. “ _L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune / Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur / Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune_.” She takes his hand in hers. “Paul Verlaine’s _Clair de Lune_. Paris, 1869. Debussy’s inspiration.”

He sighs, but she can see that he is smiling. “And for those of us who haven’t suffered through a French lesson since primary school?”

“Please,” she says. “Like there’s anything about this piece you don’t already know.” 

He leans against the desk and crosses his arms over his chest, his posture one part eager audience and one part impatient professor. When she rolls her eyes, he clears his throat expectantly. 

“All right, all right.” She gives herself a moment to be sure she remembers the translation, and then she says:

“The while they celebrate in minor strain  
     Triumphant love, effective enterprise,  
They have an air of knowing all is vain—  
     And through the quiet moonlight their songs rise.”

He frowns. “A little depressing, isn’t it?”

She shrugs. “It’s French.”

He reaches up and touches her cheek. “Sometimes, my love, I forget how young you really are.” 

If he were anyone else, this would infuriate her. Instead she exhales, something tight and painful twisting in her chest. She takes the Starfleet letter from the desk and folds it again. “I thought you’d be angry,” she says. “That I didn’t tell you.”

“That’s not why you thought I would be angry.”

She looks up. “ _Baba_ , when I was six you drew horns and a tail on a photo of the Starfleet Commander in Chief and told me he was the Devil. Of course that’s not why I thought you’d be angry.”

He smiles, but his eyes are tired. “Subtlety has never been one of my virtues.” He rubs a hand over his face and straightens, stepping away from the desk. “You were three years old when your mother took you off-world for the first time. We fought about it for days, but she—” He struggles for a moment, and Uhura has rarely seen anything so disturbing as her father at a loss for words. He shakes his head. “She wanted so badly for you to love what she loved. For you to see the world as she did.” He looks away. “Even if it meant that you would one day leave us behind.”

“I remember that,” she says softly. She doesn’t add that it is her only clear memory of her mother – the rumble of the shuttle beneath them, the green striped seat cushions, the elation on her mother’s face. And what waited outside the window – the blue-white planet below, the darkness around them, and the stars in the distance. “And just think, Nyota,” her mother had whispered in her ear, “just think how much more there is to see.”

Uhura steps forward, wrapping her arms around her father’s thin shoulders. “I’m never,” she says, “never going to leave you behind.”

He gives her a brief squeeze. “You couldn’t if you tried.” He pulls away. “My pals from the circus would help me hunt you down.”

“Great,” she says. “Now I’m going to have circus folk nightmares.”

“You can join us, if you’d like,” he adds magnanimously. “But you’ll have to grow a beard.”

A bird calls from a nearby tree, and both father and daughter turn to watch the daylight fade in the endless Kenyan sky. The Debussy comes to an end, and for a moment the gramophone is silent. Then a light on the base of the machine blinks, and it begins to play Johnny Cash’s _A Boy Named Sue_. Loudly.

“I loved your mother,” Hasan Uhura says, “but she really did have the most awful sense of humor.” 

++

It is their last night in Iowa, and their first night of leave since they arrived. They pile into a car, two cadets to every seat, and drive the few short miles to the Riverside shipyard. They stop just outside the fence, engine idling. 

Uhura was thirteen years old when she first read her mother’s Academy dissertation. Her mother’s area of study was Warp Engineering with a focus on antimatter reactivity, and even now Uhura struggles with all but the paper’s most basic concepts. Every year she reads it again, and every year she understands a little more.

But in the midst of warp core diagrams and endless pages of equations, there are two short paragraphs of digression that have always confused her. They serve no purpose within the paper; they do nothing to support its thesis.

She looks up at the U.S.S. Enterprise, unfinished and wreathed in light, and she thinks she finally understands.

_It is hard_ , her mother wrote, _not to love the things you fix. At first you see them only as parts of a whole – theories put into practice, blueprints made flesh, broken pieces to mend. Numbers on a page. They are dry, static. Untouchable._

_But then you do touch them. You have to – it’s how you survive. The engines, the transporter, the ship itself – these are the theories, the equations and broken pieces that stand between you and the silence outside. You touch them, live inside them, and soon you put your ear to the door of the engine room and hear the heartbeat of a friend._

_It’s hard not to love the things you fix.  
_  
Uhura memorized those words years ago; now she sees the pale silhouette of starship against night sky and finally hears them in her mother’s voice.

“Yeah, yeah,” Gaila says from the backseat of the car, “I get it – it’s a very pretty ship. Can we please go get stinking drunk now?” 

There’s a cry of agreement from the rest of the car, and Uhura shifts the vehicle into reverse. When they pull into the parking lot of the Shipyard Bar, she’s still smiling.

++

It is a well-documented fact that the xenolinguistics department has the best parties. That most of this documentation involves metrically perfect epics spontaneously composed in Klingon is entirely beside the point – linguists know how to party.

The neighborhood to the east of Starfleet Academy is a crowded honeycomb of bars and pubs – some are grand and some are cheap and some are little more than a hole in the wall with a stool and a tap, and each one is favored by a particular subset of Academy cadets. The xenolinguistics department gathers at the Royal Lion, an ‘authentic English public house’ that’s about as authentic as the wood of the Formica tables. Uhura loves it.

But then, after a few shots of whiskey Uhura loves pretty much everything and everyone. She’s a very cheerful drunk.

“My life is ruined,” Uhura moans into her drink. “Ruined ruined ruined.”

“Very good,” Cadet Davis says, popping a peanut into his mouth. “Now say it in Latin.”

“Gods,” Gaila says, “don’t encourage her.”

Gaila is not part of the xenolinguistics department, but if there’s a party somewhere near campus, one can be sure that Gaila will be there. Uhura suspects that her roommate must have resorted to cloning, or possibly astral projection, in order to achieve this effect; after two years of living together, neither of these explanations would surprise her.

Uhura sways in her chair. “ _Vita mea perdita est_ ,” she says. “ _Perdita perdita perdita est_.”   
    
Davis pats her shoulder. “See,” he says, “this is what happens when you’re a teacher’s pet. The teacher gets knocked up and all of a sudden the happy couple isn’t so sure they want Fluffy scratching her fleas on the couch anymore. Then before you can say _hey, but what about that dissertation we’ve been working on for the last two years_ , you’ve been abandoned at the pound with the rest of the brown nosers.”

Uhura scowls at him. “I do _not_ have fleas.”

“Wait a second,” Gaila says. “Who’s knocked up?”

“Commander Lee,” Davis and Uhura answer in unison.

Gaila frowns. “Who’s Commander Lee?”

“Gaila,” Uhura says slowly, because sometimes Gaila has trouble following conversations that aren’t about her, “Commander Lee is my dissertation supervisor. This is her going away party. She’s taking a sabbatical to have the baby.”

“Oh.” Gaila thinks about this for a moment. “So you’re pretty much screwed, then.”

“Yeah,” Uhura says. “Pretty much.”

Davis flips his too-long bangs out of his eyes. “And it’s not like there’s anyone in the department qualified to replace her. Who’s going to teach Advanced Phonology next term? Not Martinez, and certainly not Abrams.” He elbows Uhura in the side and gives her a mocking, lopsided grin. “You’ve been her TA for years, and you practically wrote that syllabus. Maybe you should apply for the job.”

“Harmon Davis,” a rich female voice drawls from behind them, “you stop teasing my aide this very instant, or I swear I will not be held responsible for my hormone-driven acts of rage.”

“Annabelle!” Uhura stands up from her chair and throws her arms around her former instructor, clinging in a way that will be horribly embarrassing the next morning, but at the moment seems absolutely vital. “Please, please don’t leave,” she says into the Commander’s perfumed shoulder. “I promise I’ll stop alphabetizing your magazines.”

Commander Annabelle Lee is somewhat of an Academy eccentric, even by the xenolinguistics department’s standards. She prefers pastel sweater sets to the grey regulation uniform, first names to formalities, and giving hugs to giving demerits. She keeps a jar of lollipops on her desk with a note taped to the front that says, _Don’t be a sucker – a little sugar’s good for the soul!  
_  
She’s also the fiercest grader in the department, a Federation-renowned academic with a mind like a razor, and the best instructor Uhura’s ever had. If she finds it strange that her usually reserved aide is clutching her like a child with a security blanket, she gives no sign. “Oh, sweetheart,” she says, “you know you’re gonna be just fine without me.”

Uhura sniffles something that sounds like, “banished to academic obscurity,” and the Commander laughs.

“You silly,” Lee says, grinning. “You don’t think I’d leave you all alone, do you? And you with only eight months left until your defense!” 

Davis sits up straighter at that. “So you do have a replacement lined up?”

Lee’s grin turns mischievous. “It’s not finalized yet, but yeah – I’ve got one hell of a replacement in mind.” She turns back to Uhura. “You’re gonna flip. Absolutely _flip_.”

“Well,” Gaila says, “that should be fun to watch.”

After that, there’s considerably less moping and considerably more drinking. As the hour grows late the instructors disappear one by one into the damp night air _(and occasionally two by two, though everyone pretends not to notice)_ , and soon the cadets are alone in the bar. Davis slams his empty glass down onto the table and says, “It’s time. Someone turn off the music.” The music goes quiet; the room fills with an expectant silence. 

Uhura’s eyes widen. “No. No, absolutely not.”

He grins his Hollywood grin. “Absolutely yes.”

“Davis, if you think—”

He stands. “I think, Ms. Uhura, that this is your hour of glory, a moment set aside by the Fates in their munificence so that we may bask in the radiance that is your genius.” He steps up onto the table and switches to Klingon, his inflection flawless. “It is the night of your triumph!”

Every cadet in the bar begins to cheer, some shouting their encouragement in Klingon, in Vulcan, in half a dozen languages from Earth and beyond. _(“What a bunch of nerds,” a familiar voice yells in an obscure Orion dialect, and Uhura can’t help but agree.)  
_  
Davis reaches down and takes Uhura’s hand, pulling her up onto the table. As she steadies herself against his shoulder, she says in his ear, “Just so you know, I’ve always thought you look like a wiener when you speak Klingon.”

“That’s ‘cause I do,” he says. He hops off the table. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he cries with a flourish, his voice rising above the clamor of the room, “I give you Cadet Uhura, pride of the African Confederacy, terror of every first year linguistics student, and bard of the Academy Starfleet. She’s a little drunk right now, so if it looks like she’s about to fall off the table—”

The cheers grow louder, and Uhura rolls her eyes. “If I sing the stupid song,” she shouts, trying not to grin, “will you guys finally shut up about it?”

“Until next year!” someone yells, and everyone laughs.

Uhura holds up one hand, and the bar falls silent. Then she begins to tap her foot in a slow, steady rhythm. The other cadets pick up the rhythm, boots tapping against the floor and hands slapping the tables. And when they’re carrying the beat on their own, Uhura begins to recite the _V’hak Ne Ki’ne Tevik na’ Tam’a_.

She’d memorized it on a dare during her first year at the Academy, and ever since it’s been an end-of-term tradition. Roughly translated from the Old High Vulcan as _A Ballad for the Ghost of my Fallen Companion_ , it is one thousand and three verses of what at first glance appears to be horrendously sentimental, horrifically violent pre-Awakening Vulcan war poetry. But in the hands of a skilled performer, it becomes clear that the great warrior epic is actually a long series of cleverly veiled jokes about penises.  

Most of her audience isn’t quite up to speed on their Old High Vulcan; to compensate, Uhura is careful to make everything sound extraordinarily dirty. Davis and some of the others join her on the refrain, and ten minutes later the whole bar is singing and stomping along – even Gaila, though she’d deny it until her dying day.

Uhura’s just finished the bit about the warrior Sisark polishing his _li-wun_ after a strenuous battle when she realizes that the others have stopped singing. Realizes that they have, in fact, gone completely silent, and are staring at something just behind her.

She turns around, and Commander Spock is standing in the door of the Royal Lion. He looks pale and grey and utterly unamused.

“I assume,” he says, his voice carrying across the room, “that you are Cadet Uhura.”

When she tries to stand at attention, she discovers that she’s only wearing one shoe. “Yes, Commander,” she says, teetering slightly. It takes all her considerable self-possession to stop herself from biting her lip like a guilty child. “I—”

He raises his hand, and she goes silent. He walks over to her table, the other cadets retreating as he advances. He stands at the end of the long table and looks up at her. “Commander Lee asked that I inform you as soon as her request was approved; I believe she hoped that the knowledge would bring you much-needed peace of mind.”

She hesitates. “I’m sorry, sir?”       

He inclines his head slightly, as if acknowledging her ignorance. “At Commander Lee’s behest, I will assume her responsibilities for the duration of her sabbatical. Thus you are to be my aide, and I your advisor.” He pauses. “If you will meet me in the Commander’s office tomorrow morning at 0800, we will discuss future arrangements in greater detail.”

Uhura stares at him, open-mouthed. _(“Well, would you look at that,” Gaila says from the other side of the room. “She’s flipped.”)_ She closes her mouth, hard, and winces at the click of her teeth. “Yes, sir,” she says. There’s a silence, and then she adds: “Thank you.”

For the first time since he entered the bar, she sees a change in the Commander’s expression – a twitch, just at the right corner of his mouth. It’s gone before she can be sure it was ever there. “I have done nothing yet, Ms. Uhura, for which you can thank me.” He nods to the rest of room. “Enjoy the remainder of your evening, Cadets.”

The crowd murmurs a ‘Thank you, Commander’ in return. The Commander turns to go, but when he reaches the door he hesitates. He looks over his shoulder at her, and their eyes meet.

“ _V’hak Ne Ki’ne Tevik na’ Tam’a_ ,” he says. “A curious choice.”

“Yes, sir,” Uhura says.

He folds his hands behind his back. “While it was clear that your comprehension of the text is unusually…” he pauses, and the corner of his mouth twitches again, “ _thorough_ , your pronunciation suffered somewhat in the later verses. I trust this was due to the nature of the performance and your own inebriation, and not to a more general deficiency in your abilities.”          

“Yes, sir,” Uhura says.

“Very well.” He reaches up and pulls something from the coat stand by his head. He holds it out to her. “Your shoe.”  

She climbs down from the table and hobbles across the floor to where he stands. She takes the shoe. “Thank you, Commander Spock.”

He nods. “You are most welcome, Cadet Uhura.” He leaves, and the door closes behind him.

“I think,” Uhura says to no one in particular, “that I’m going to throw up.” She’s right; she only just reaches the toilet in the Ladies before she loses her dinner, and probably most of her lunch.

Gaila holds Uhura’s hair back while she vomits and brings her a glass of water when she’s done, and it almost makes up for the fact that she laughs the whole time.

++

The next morning Uhura makes it to Commander Lee’s old office with two minutes to spare. She arrives poised and impeccably dressed, her uniform bright and uncreased, her hair neatly arranged in its ponytail. She thinks she might still be a little drunk. The door to the outer room of the office is open, and she steps inside.

Her desk is the same as she left it – a bit cluttered, perhaps, but with an obvious method to the madness. She grabs her PADD and its stylus from beneath a stack of exams and walks to the open door of the inner room, her stomach heavy with dread and lingering embarrassment from the night before.

The room has been stripped, the beige walls left bare and the floor scrubbed clean. All that remains of Lee’s warm, welcoming office is the jar of lollipops sitting in the middle of the otherwise empty desk.

Commander Spock stands in the center of the room, staring at the note on the jar: _Don’t be a sucker – a little sugar’s good for the soul!_ If Uhura didn’t know better, she’d say he looked almost puzzled.

“Commander Lee likes to throw people off,” she says, by way of explanation. “It’s sort of her thing.”

Commander Spock nods. “So I am learning.” He takes a cherry lollipop from the jar and sits behind the desk. The cellophane wrapper crinkles as he removes it. “Please sit, Ms. Uhura, and have a sucker. I understand that their consumption is considered somewhat spiritually beneficial.”

Surprised, Uhura hesitates. “Thank you, sir.” She chooses a sour apple lollipop and sits in her usual chair. When the Commander pops the cherry red sucker into his mouth, she has to fake a cough to hide her grin.  

The lollipop leaves his mouth with a wet smack. “Cadet Uhura, though I myself rarely express emotion, I do not expect those around me to exercise a similar restraint.” The corner of his mouth twitches, and his dark eyes are bright. “Your amusement,” he adds, “is entirely justified.”

The social scientist in Uhura wishes she had some way to record the moment: _a Vulcan laughing at himself_. It’s preposterous, and perhaps ever so slightly charming. In the name of scientific discovery, she decides to play along. Keeping her tone severe and her expression playful, she leans forward in her chair and says, “I don’t make a habit, Commander, of laughing at my instructors.”

“Then your academic career must thus far have been dull indeed.” He pulls a PADD from the satchel leaning against the side of the desk. He taps the screen twice with the stylus, then looks up and meets her eyes. “It will be a stimulating challenge to coordinate our schedules for next term. Shall we begin?”

It isn’t until she leaves the office an hour later, PADD in one hand and uneaten sour apple lollipop in the other, that she realizes what he’s done. She pops her head back into the office and sees him holding a half-eaten lollipop in front of his face, staring at it as it turns between his fingers, reflecting light. She clears her throat. “Commander?”

He doesn’t look away from the lollipop. “Yes, Cadet?”

She takes a deep breath and steps further into the room. “I still feel like an idiot about last night. I wanted to apologize.”

Spock meets her gaze and holds it. “There is no need for an apology.” She opens her mouth to object, but he shakes his head. “No, Ms. Uhura, of this I am quite certain – we must each of us play the fool from time to time.” He sticks the lollipop back into his mouth. “Now,” he says, voice garbled by the candy, “if you will excuse me.”

She waits until she’s safely in the corridor before she starts to laugh.


	2. Chapter 2

Davis lies back against the pillows, his bangs falling artfully into his eyes. A beam of early morning sunlight escapes the window blinds and illuminates the smooth skin of his shoulder. “I don’t get it,” he says. “After what happened at the Lion last term, I figured you’d hate his Vulcan guts.”

Uhura reaches over and tugs a lock of his hair. “You go to the salon more often than anyone I know; why do you always look like you need a haircut?”

He grabs her hand, fingers curling around her wrist. He grins. “It’s called style, lady friend. And don’t change the subject.”

She rolls away from him and sits up. The floor is cold against her bare feet, and she wiggles her toes. “Of course I don’t hate Spock. Why would I?”

“He humiliated you.”

She turns her head, looking down at him. “It wasn’t that bad.”

He arches an eyebrow. “You were on the table. There was dancing.”

“Not his fault.” She gives him a hard look, as if to remind him that she remembers exactly whose fault it was. “Why are you asking me about this?”

He folds his hands behind his head. “No reason. Just idle curiosity.”

His smile is too innocent, his posture too casual; she pokes him in the chest. “You’re up to something, Davis; I can smell it.”

He runs his hand along the length of her spine, his fingers tripping over vertebrae. “You know, Uhura, just ‘cause _you_ go ballistic whenever someone uses your first name—”

She rises to her feet, stepping away from the bed. “I do not.”

“—That doesn’t mean you can’t call me by mine.” He smirks. “You might even enjoy it.” 

She grabs her running shorts from the floor under his desk. She steps into them and pulls the waistband up over her hips. “You want me to call you _Harmon_? Seriously?”

He frowns. “Well, not when you say it like that.”  
   
“Where the hell are my socks?” After a moment she finds them, one under a chair, the other in a wastepaper basket. Her sneakers are by the door, which means—

Davis is sitting up in the rumpled bed, her t-shirt in one hand and her bra in the other. His grin is blindingly white in his tan, handsome face, and though they’ve been friends for years she sort of wants to punch him in the teeth. “You probably don’t want to leave without this,” he says, and gives her bra a little shake.

She snatches it out of his hand. “Why are you asking me about Spock?”  
   
“ _Commander_ Spock, Cadet.” He switches to somewhat stilted Vulcan: “Such a familiarity when referring to one’s superior is most inappropriate.”   
     
She presses her lips together, strangely embarrassed. “Stop being a dick and answer the question.”

He shrugs and tosses her the t-shirt. “I’m in Advanced Phonology this term. Graduation requirement. Figures that after putting it off all these years I’d get stuck with him.”

She stares at him. “Davis, I’m the TA for that course.”

“Yeah, I know. Lucky me.” Then it sinks in, and his grin disappears. “Wait, does this mean no more early morning booty calls?”

She tugs her t-shirt on over her head. “That’s exactly what it means.” She bends down and kisses his cheek. “It’s been fun, stud. See you in class.”

He sits back, his head bumping the wall above the bed. “This sucks.”

“And you haven’t even seen the syllabus yet.” She gives him a wink. “Don’t forget to be thorough in your assignments. You know what I’m like with a red pen.”  

He whines her name, but she’s already out the door, hopping from one leg to the other as she tugs on socks and sneakers. A few quick stretches in the dim hallway outside his room and then she’s running, picking up speed as she flies toward the exit and bursts out the doors and into sunlight.

She started running when she was thirteen, after she grew four inches in as many months and felt like a stranger in her own body. Hasan Uhura was a man of the mind, one who gave only perfunctory attention to the concerns of his own body, much less that of anyone else’s; the sudden transformation of his small, graceful daughter into a maelstrom of elbows and knees and _teenage girl_ had baffled him completely.

Uhura had never been a quiet child, but there was a vast difference between a perfectly natural inquisitiveness and the near-constant irrational heartbreak of your average thirteen-year-old, and after the third time she’d knocked over his music stand and burst into tears he’d pointed her in the direction of the front door and told her to run circles around the house if she had to, but not to come back until she could behave like a reasonable human being.

After ten laps around the property she slammed back into her father’s study, her t-shirt dark with sweat, and told him that she’d never met a reasonable human being in her life and neither had he, and that the middle of an already cluttered room was a damned stupid place to put a music stand, anyway.  
   
He still likes to tell that story, and she still likes to run in circles. It empties her mind, leaves her hollow and weightless and quiet. She doesn’t run with a partner, and she doesn’t listen to music – she listens to her breath, to her feet against the ground. The rare silence. The sun slowly burns the early morning mist from the air, and dew clings to her sneakers. Autumn is new, summer barely spent, but until two days ago she was home and she has yet to reacquaint herself with the Californian chill.

She grins against the cold and keeps running. 

“Cadet Uhura,” a voice says from the path, and she stumbles to a stop.

Spock is watching her from a few feet away, satchel under his arm and a thermos in his hand. Now that she’s lost momentum she can feel the quivering muscles of her legs, begging her to either run on or lie down for a nice nap. She rests her hands on her knees, breathing hard, and smiles up at him. “Morning, Commander. On your way to your new office?”

“I am.” He pauses, and then he steps off the path, moving toward her. “I did not expect to see you until our meeting at 0900.”

She takes another deep breath and stands upright. “A pleasant surprise?”

“It is not surprising,” he says, his face perfectly expressionless. “Unplanned social encounters are a likely occurrence in an insular community such as our own.” He is silent for a moment; he readjusts his grip on the thermos. “You look well.”

“Thank you.” She brushes a sweat-damp strand of hair out of her face, behind her ear. “I spent most of the break visiting my father in Kenya. His isn’t exactly the most relaxing presence on Earth, but I always feel better after being home.”

“Kenya?” Spock’s eyes widen. “Your father is Hasan Uhura, the composer?”

She laughs. “These days he goes by Hasan Uhura, the grump. But he’ll be thrilled that I met someone who’s actually heard of him.”    

He steps closer. “Ms. Uhura, your father is one of the great Classical Revivalist composers. I do not claim any expertise in contemporary Terran music, but I am quite familiar with his works.” He pauses. “It is strange that I did not make the connection sooner. One of Hasan Uhura’s most remarkable pieces is his _Lullaby for Nyota_.”

Uhura tenses. “He wrote that for my mother, sir. Her name was Nyota.”

He studies her face for a long moment. “You do not use your given name.”

“No,” she says. “I don’t.”

There is a short silence, and then he nods. “I have interrupted your morning exercise. My apologies.” He takes a step back, toward the path, but she moves forward, following him.

“I’m glad you did. I get so into my head when I’m running that I lose track of time; if you hadn’t stopped me, I might’ve been late for our meeting.” This is almost a lie – her watch is set to alert her when it’s time to return to her dormitory – but she doesn’t want him to walk away. She isn’t sure why until the tension leaves his shoulders, a tension she could not see until it was gone.

His expression doesn’t change, but there’s something like amusement in his eyes. “That would have been unfortunate. As you may suspect, I find punctuality to be of the utmost importance.”

She grins. “I’d guessed that, yes.”    
   
He steps forward, and suddenly he is close – not inappropriately so, but closer than necessary for casual conversation. His lips curve slightly. “I hope, Ms. Uhura, that you do not often ‘guess.’ It suggests a lack of intellectual rigor inconsistent with your obvious abilities and ambition.”    
   
It’s an effort to look into his eyes and not at his mouth; somehow, she manages. “Ambition, sir?”

“You forget that I have read your dissertation,” he says, his gaze steady and locked on her own. “‘Ambitious’ is only the first of many descriptors that apply.”   
   
It’s foolish to imagine that she can feel the heat of his body from this distance – she blames the chill in the air as she leans closer. “You didn’t happen to list these descriptors in alphabetical order, did you?”

“I did not, though it is logical that such a system would appeal to a mind like your own.”

She almost laughs. “Are you calling me a control freak, Commander?”

“Certainly not, Cadet. I avoid hypocrisy whenever possible.” He steps back, moving out of her space; she is at once relieved and oddly regretful. He looks away, and she does the same. He clears his throat softly. “If you are amenable, I will share my notes on your preliminary draft after classes have begun. I expect that this coming week will find us somewhat preoccupied by administrative tasks.”

Uhura makes a face, her nose wrinkling.

“Indeed,” Spock says. “My thoughts on the matter are quite similar.” He takes another step backward, and he is on the path again. “We will need to meet frequently in the coming months. We have much to discuss.”

“Yes, sir,” she says. “I look forward to hearing your notes on my draft.”

This time she’s sure she isn’t imagining it – the corner of his mouth rises in something very much like a smirk. “You may feel differently, Ms. Uhura, once you have heard them.” He nods to her, his expression again a blank. “You were correct; this encounter has been a most pleasant surprise. I will see you in our office at 0900.”

He walks away, and for a long moment she stands and watches him go.

“Well,” she says. “That was weird.”

++

One month later Uhura comes home to find Gaila squatting on the floor between their beds in her underwear, her hands buried in a computer monitor. There are at least four consoles worth of electrical parts scattered around the room. Uhura’s bed is piled high with circuit boards.

Uhura drops her bag to the floor; there’s nowhere else to put it. “Gaila.”

Her roommate raises her head, her expression more annoyed than contrite. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. You’re never home before seven on Wednesdays.”

Uhura crosses her arms over her chest. “We have one rule, Gaila. Just one.”

Gaila rolls her eyes. “One rule? Please, you’re the princess of rules. You love rules so much that I wish you’d just marry a rule and have dozens of adorable little rule babies.” She pauses. “I could be their Auntie Gaila.” 

“Gaila.”

“I’d be a great auntie. I’d wear big floppy hats and have a vegetable garden.”

“ _Gaila_.”

Gaila sighs. “No sex or pointy computer bits on your bed. That’s the rule.” Gaila reaches over from her spot on the floor and tugs at the hem of Uhura’s uniform skirt. “You’re never home before seven on Wednesdays. Wednesdays are Vulcan days.”

Uhura gently pushes some equipment aside and settles down on the floor. “Yeah, and thanks for hacking into the calendar on my PADD, by the way. One of these Vulcan days he’s going to see my weekly schedule and think I’m completely insane.”

“I think he’ll appreciate the little emotionless smiley faces I put next to all your scheduled meetings.”

Uhura pulls her hair free of its ponytail and begins to scritch her fingers along her scalp. “Can it really be a smiley face if it’s emotionless?”

Gaila pokes her in the shoulder. “Stop thinking all the time. It might be contagious, and I don’t want to catch it.”

“Hey, I’m not the one building a starship’s command computer in my spare time.” She picks up a circuit component lying next to her feet. “What’re you doing with all this stuff, anyway?”

Gaila shrugs. “I’ll explain if you want, but it’s kind of beyond your comprehension level. It’ll just annoy you.”

Uhura looks up, her eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re a perfectionistic pain in my ass,” Gaila doesn’t say – though it’s clearly what she’s thinking. Instead she takes a deep breath and says, “Uhura, why are you home early?”      

Uhura pulls her knees to her chest and sighs. “The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.”

Gaila blinks. “Okay. Not the answer I was expecting.” She reaches over and begins to tug at Uhura’s right boot. Uhura extends her leg and the boot comes off. Gaila wrinkles her nose. “Gods, your feet smell. Humans are so weird.”

“Gaila, if you didn’t take pheromone suppressants, just being in the same room with you would give me a migraine. Do you really want to start the ‘who’s the stinkier alien’ fight again?”  

Gaila smirks. “You are so stinkier.”

Uhura pulls off her other boot and lifts both feet into the air by Gaila’s face. “Admit it. You love my stinky human feet.”

Gaila darts forward and plants a wet kiss on Uhura’s heel. Uhura shrieks and rolls away, laughing. “Crap,” she gasps, “I think I just impaled myself on a hard drive.”

“Whiner.” Gaila begins to collect her equipment, packing it away in the cardboard boxes she keeps under her bed with the dirty laundry. “So what’s the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? I probably won’t understand, but I promise to nod in the right places.”

Uhura can’t help it – she snaps into teaching mode. “How much do you know about Romulans?”

Gaila purses her lips, thinking. “I hear they’re pretty fierce in the sack. Aside from that, not much.”

“Yeah,” Uhura says, “ _not much_ is about as much as anyone knows. A lot of people think they share a common ancestry with Vulcans, that they left Vulcan during the Time of Awakening because they opposed Surak’s teachings.”

“Inner peace isn’t for everyone,” Gaila says.

“Romulans don’t seem too fond of it, no.” She falls silent, and Gaila watches her out of the corner of her eye, carefully pretending to be absorbed in her circuit boards. Gaila knows how Uhura’s mother died; everyone does. There are four cadets at the Academy who lost a parent when a mysterious Romulan ship destroyed the Kelvin twenty-four years ago this January, and everyone knows their names. It’s not something people talk about where she can hear them.

“I don’t see what any of this has to do with linguistics,” Gaila says. “Or why you’re here bugging me instead of sitting in an office across campus making moon eyes at Count Spockula.”

Uhura winces. “Spockula?”

“You know. The Spockinator. The Spock Man. Dr. Spockenstein.” Her eyes light up. “Wait. Would that make you Spockenstein’s Monster?”  

Uhura stares at her, horrified. “Your immersion in Earth culture ends tonight,” she says. “And this time I mean it.”

“Whatever.” She pauses. “Bride of Spockenstein.”

Uhura laughs, hanging her head. There’s an edge of something like hysteria to her laughter, and Gaila hears it. She kneels beside Uhura and waits, her hand on her friend’s shoulder. Eventually Uhura looks up, her eyes damp and her smile crooked. “The Spockinator finds fault with the basic premise of my dissertation,” she says.

Gaila gapes. “You’re joking.”

“I’m not.” Uhura chuckles. “And believe me, neither is he.”

“But—” Gaila seems at a loss for words. “But you’re a genius!”

“Not technically,” Uhura reminds her, not for the first time. “Technically I’m only gifted.”

Gaila huffs, her nostrils flaring a little in genuine anger. “All right, so what does Commander Spock ‘find fault’ with, exactly?” She answers her own question. “The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?”

Uhura nods. “Linguistic relativity. The theory that a society’s language affects its perception of reality.” Gaila gives her a blank look. “Like, for example – and this is a gross oversimplification – you and I come from cultures that speak very different languages. Well, I grew up speaking several, which complicates the point, but the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that because Kiswahili and Orion Standard have different words for the color red, you and I may perceive the color itself differently.”

Gaila nods slowly. “That explains so much about the way you dress.”

Uhura crosses her arms over her chest and leans back against the side of her bed. “We don’t know much more about the Romulan language than we do about the Romulans themselves. We’ve used the few transmission recordings we have to differentiate three fairly distinct dialects, and they’re enough like Modern Vulcan that most Starfleet linguists just translate them as if they were. Until we know more that’s the best we can do, and it’s not enough.”

Understanding dawns in Gaila’s face. “But you’ve figured it out.”

Uhura shakes her head. “No, but I’m close. I’m _so close_ , Gaila.” She feels her fingers clench into fists. “The morphological and phonetic similarities between Vulcan and the Romulan dialects are all drawn from Old High Vulcan, which had been pretty much dead for centuries when the two cultures split.” She leans forward. “I think that when the Romulans’ ancestors rejected Vulcan logic, they rejected the Vulcan language along with it.”

Gaila’s eyes widen. “Because talking like a Vulcan means thinking like a Vulcan?”     

“Because the shape of the words we use to talk about the world shape the world we see.” Uhura stands and begins to pace between their beds, stepping over bits of computer. “If the early Romulans agreed with me, if they wanted to see the universe in a new way, with a new grammar and a new syntax, they must have revived the tongue of their warrior ancestors and returned to the pure violence of emotion that Surak was trying to eliminate.” She stops pacing and meets her friend’s eyes. “Gaila, I think that by treating each of the three dialects as deliberate reactions against 4th century Vulcan Standard I can revolutionize our knowledge of the Romulan language, and through it our understanding of their culture.” She hesitates. “I think that I can make a contribution. A real one.”

Gaila thinks about this for a long moment. “And what does Spock say?”

Uhura lets the muscles of her face go still, then tilts her head slightly to one side. “It is an intriguing premise, Ms. Uhura, but at this time I see little evidence to support your theories. As your supervisor it is my duty to inform you of my concern.” She lifts one cool eyebrow. “I do not mean to suggest that you should desist from your inquiries into the matter – failure is an educational experience, and your education is our primary objective.” Uhura folds her arms over her chest, her mouth twisting in anger. “Bastard.”

Gaila grins, her face luminous. “Boy, has he got your number.”

Uhura frowns. “What?”

Gaila hops up from the floor onto Uhura’s bed, still grinning ear to ear. “Darling, sweetheart, light of my life, I say this with love, but you need to be taken down a peg every once in a while. Your dad’s thousands of miles away and I do what I can, but I have a social schedule to maintain. The rest of the Academy thinks every word out of your mouth is made of gold.” Her expression turns serious. “It’s not good for you. If you start to believe you’re as perfect they think you are you’ll get lazy and you’ll get complacent, and then you’ll _really_ be insufferable.” She reaches up and squeezes Uhura’s hand. “He’s giving you a challenge, sweetie. He gave you a push and now he wants you to push back.”

“But—” Uhura stops, then sits down on the bed with a plop. “Oh.”

Gaila pats her head. “Don’t feel bad. You may only be gifted, but I’m a genius when it comes to men.” She pauses. “And women.” She pauses again. “And pretty much everyone else.”

“But he _lied_ to me! Vulcans can’t lie.”

Gaila laughs. “Honey, you show me a sentient being who doesn’t lie and I’ll show you a sentient being without a tongue.” She leans back on the bed, resting on her elbows. “Did he actually say he thought you were wrong?”

Uhura thinks back, covering her mouth with her hand. “No,” she says through her fingers, “not in those words.”

“Oh, he’s _good_.” Gaila does a little wiggle. “It’s kind of sexy, don’t you think?”

Uhura glares at her. “Not really, no.” She reaches under her bed for her boots and begins to pull them on.

“Where are you going?” Gaila says. “You just got home.”

Uhura ties her hair back tightly, giving it a yank when it refuses to cooperate. “I’m going to the library and I’m rewriting my first chapter.” She grabs her bag from the floor. “He wants me to push back? I’ll give him a push back.”

She strides out of the room so fast the door almost doesn’t slide open in time to let her out. Gaila sighs and lies back on the bed. “You can come out now, Hikaru. She’s gone.”

Sulu stumbles out of the wardrobe, a clothes hanger hooked in the back of his collar. He looks a little dazed. “Your roommate seems really nice,” he says. “Smart, too.”

Gaila grins. “She has her moments.”

++

  
Four days and sleepless nights later Uhura sends Spock the revised draft of her first two chapters. When she returns to the office that afternoon, the door to the inner room is closed for the first time since the term began.

“Fine,” she mutters. “Be that way.” She sits at her desk and stares at the empty screen of her PADD. She has assignments to grade, but the room is swimming and her arms are weirdly heavy and it’s an effort just to pick up the stylus and open the right file. Her stomach makes a sound like a rabid, dying animal and when she looks at the clock on the wall she sees that somehow thirteen minutes have passed and it feels like she’s spent all that time trapped in one long, slow blink.

“Ms. Uhura,” a cool, even voice says from far away, “can you hear me?”

The blink ends, and the room is bright again. She looks up and sees Spock staring down at her. “I think,” she says, “that I either fell asleep sitting up or I just suffered my first psychotic episode.”

The thin line of his mouth relaxes somewhat; her exhaustion-fogged mind can’t help but wonder if he had been worried. “You have been remiss in your sleep schedule in recent days. You require rest.” Her stomach growls again. “And nourishment.”

She picks up her PADD, then tries to remember when she set it down. “I have work to do.”

He gently takes the PADD from her hands. “I would like to speak with you. I will be brief, and then you may return to your work.”    

It’s an effort not to sway as she stands, but she manages to follow him into his office without falling over. He redecorated during the break, adding a bookshelf full of antiques and a high glass-topped table in the corner to hold a burner for incense and a self-warming teakettle. The walls are still an awful shade of beige but the light has changed, turned low and golden warm, and if he weren’t standing there staring at her she would curl up on the floor like a cat and be asleep in seconds.

Uhura takes her usual chair. The jar of lollipops sits on the edge of the desk, almost as full as it had been the day Commander Lee left it behind. Then Uhura looks again and says, “You’re out of the cherry-flavored ones. You should get more.”

Spock pauses mid-step, halfway to his chair. “Vulcan taste buds are ill-suited for sweets,” he says. “I have no need to replenish my supply.” He continues to his chair and sits, steepling his fingers. There is a short, still silence. “I have read your revised chapters.”

She nods and braces her ego for the bludgeoning to come. This time she’s prepared, and she has a plan – she’s going to sit quietly while he crushes her soul in his neatly-manicured fist, then finish her grading, re-rewrite her first chapter, do her laundry, and take a nap for the next thirty years. She might wake up sometime around year fifteen to eat a sandwich; she hasn’t decided yet.

Oh. _Sandwiches_.  

Spock watches her, touching his steepled fingers to his mouth. “Do you play chess, Ms. Uhura?”

“What?” she says, horrified.  

He almost frowns. “I said, ‘Do you—’”

“No, I don’t,” she says. “Not at all. I mean, I understand the basics of the game, but no – I don’t play.” She panics quietly for a moment, and then confesses: “I’ve tried, but I’m terrible. Really, really bad. And by _bad_ , I mean _awful_ ; honestly, I still have nightmares about being attacked by a giant plastic horse head.” She pauses. “Though that might be about something else entirely, now that I think about it.”    

 _Really_ , Spock’s eyebrow seems to say. For some reason, she takes this as an invitation to continue babbling.

“When I was in secondary school I dated a boy in the chess club. He broke up with me.” She leans forward. “Guys never break up with me. Not ever.”

Spock clears his throat. “You believe he terminated your association because you lacked skill as a chess player?”

“I can’t imagine any other reason,” she says. “Can you?”

He hesitates. “I do not think,” he says, “that I have the sufficient amount of data required to speculate.”

She sits back in her chair, satisfied. “Exactly.” Then she frowns. “Why’d you want to know if I played?”

He opens a drawer in his desk and removes a piece of folded cardboard and a small box. He unfolds the cardboard and lays it on the desk, revealing a cheap, battered chessboard. He slides it forward until it is evenly between them. “You are gifted in many disciplines, Ms. Uhura, but one should not restrict oneself to the areas in which one’s talents lie.” He opens the box and begins to arrange the pieces on the board. “I myself lack any sort of innate musical ability.”

Her frown deepens. “I’ve heard you play the lyre. You’re good.”

“Because the effort I expended to learn outweighed my initial disadvantage.” He places the white pieces first, the pawns and the rooks. His fingers hover over the first knight, and he looks up to meet her eyes. “A giant plastic horse head?”

“I think I’ll survive the trauma,” she says.

He nods and places the knight on the board. “When I was young—” He pauses, then begins again. “Every Vulcan child strives to distinguish him or herself academically, but my motivations were of another kind. I had, as you might say, something to prove. I excelled in every available area of study.” He sets the white king in its place. “Except for music.”

Just as everyone at the Academy knows how Uhura’s mother died, everyone knows that Spock is half-human. But he’s never mentioned it before; it makes her heart beat a little faster. “No one can be good at everything,” she says.

“That was my father’s position. He argued that the logical course would be to focus my energies on the subjects I wished to pursue in the future. The subjects in which I showed the most promise.”

She takes a black pawn from the box. “The sciences?”

“Indeed.” Spock pushes the box across the desk so she can reach it more easily. “My father’s argument was a rational one, but – as was often the case in these matters – my mother disagreed.” A slight smile touches his lips. “She is at times guided by a logic all her own.”

Uhura has watched him play, has heard him talk about her father’s music. She answers his small smile with one of her own. “She could see how much you loved it. She didn’t want you to give that up.”       
      
This seems to surprise him. His expression remains as serene as always, but for the first time since she’s known him he seems to miss a beat, like the skip of a gramophone record. He recovers quickly. “‘Love’ is, unsurprisingly, not the term I would choose; even so, you are not incorrect – my fascination with music has always seemed inversely proportional to my talent for it.” He watches quietly for a moment while she places the black pieces one by one. “The Vulcan lyre is a difficult instrument. My mother suggested the piano she had brought with her from Earth as an alternative. With practice, my proficiency with both instruments grew.”

“You play the piano?”

“No,” he says. “Not for a very long time.” The black king is the last piece to find its place. Spock turns the chessboard until the white pieces rest on her side of the desk. “You will begin.”

She sits back in her chair and folds her arms across her chest. “I appreciate the moral of the story, Mr. Spock, but I don’t play chess.”

He stands. “Contemplate your opening move. I will prepare tea.”

Uhura almost walks out of the room. She hates being ignored, or dismissed, or confronted with anyone as stubborn as she is. But walking out of room would require, well, walking, and her chair really is quite comfortable.

She stares at the chessboard, her vision fizzing white around the edges. _I must be getting old_ , she thinks. _In grad school I could survive a week on only a few hours of sleep and a Cup Noodles. Now I go without for four days and I nearly give myself a stroke.  
_  
Spock turns away from the high table in the corner. “Do you prefer a particular blend of tea?”

Uhura drinks coffee, usually black. She rubs her eyes. “Anything with caffeine in it will do, thanks.”

He turns back to the teakettle, a definite note of disapproval in his silence. She studies the slope of his back, the subtle movement of his shoulder blades beneath his uniform. As her eyes travel downward, she takes a moment to enjoy the wonders of Starfleet tailoring.

“Ms. Uhura,” Spock says, “I believe you will find that your ability to strategize improves considerably when the chessboard is the focus of your gaze.”

Which is when she realizes that he can see her reflection in the metallic sheen of the teakettle. Mortified, she ducks her head and tries very, very hard not to laugh. She manages to choke out a strained, “Sorry, sir.”

Spock returns to the desk with a mug of steaming tea in each hand. He sets the larger down in front of her and sits. “I accept your apology.” He sips his tea. “How long has it been since you last slept?”

She cups her hands around the mug and feels its heat like a gentle pulse in the joints of her fingers. She closes her eyes. “A while.”

“That is not an acceptably precise answer.”

She opens her eyes to find him watching her intently. She grips the mug a little tighter. “I last slept sixty-three point four hours ago.” She pauses. “I think.”     

He sets his tea on the desk. “Because you have undertaken a massive revision of your first two chapters.” She nods, and he frowns. “You have six remaining months in which to complete your dissertation. That is sufficient time to make any necessary revisions. Your sudden urgency is self-destructive and illogical.”

She shrugs. “I was on a roll.” He stares at her, and she gives him a careless grin. “Are we going to talk about my revisions, or are we going to play chess?”

His frown fades. “You do not wish to do either,” he says, amused.

“Shucks. And I thought I was being so subtle.” She puckers her lips and exhales a long breath across the surface of her tea, dispersing steam. She takes a sip and shudders a little when it burns her tongue. “It’s good,” she says. “Hot.”

He taps a finger against the desk; he seems to be considering something. “You should return to your quarters and rest.”

She takes another sip of the tea. “I have assignments to grade.”

“I will finish your grading.”

She bristles a little at that. “And laundry. I have lots of laundry. Hours and hours worth.” He opens his mouth to object, but she shakes her head. “The assignments are my responsibility. I don’t need you to do my work for me.”

He inclines his head slightly. “Very well.” He gestures to the chessboard. “The first move is yours.” 

The game isn’t as brutal as she remembers. She’s still terrible, of course, second-guessing herself and strategizing piece by piece rather than seeing the board as a whole, but each time she finds herself in checkmate Spock returns the pieces to where they’d been five or six turns before and says, “And if I had chosen this move? How would you respond?” It transforms an uneven competition into a puzzle, something they solve together, and after a time she begins to see the patterns, the greater choreography of queen and bishop and rook, knight and pawn. Spock calls each pattern by its name – _Philidor Defense, Queen’s Gambit, Alapin Variation, Ponzani Opening_ – and now she has a vocabulary to study, a language to learn and repeat and make her own.

She’s still losing, but at least now she understands why. It’s almost fun.

Spock moves one of his pawns into a somewhat delicate position. “Benoni Defense,” he murmurs. “Fianchetto Variation.”   

Uhura bites her lip absently, staring at the board. “ _Benoni_ is Hebrew. It means _son of my sorrow_.”

“Referring, I think, to the current state of my pawn.”    
   
She flashes him a brief smile, but it’s interrupted by the growl of her stomach. She winces. “Sorry.”

He reaches into his desk and pulls out a foil packet. He opens it with a snap and passes it to her. “This lacks the nutritional value of a complete meal, but I believe it will ease your discomfort.”

Inside the packet are large, flat crackers. Uhura frowns and breaks off a corner. She nibbles at it, then looks up at him in surprise. “You keep matza in your desk?”  
     
“Most Human foods possess strong flavors that are incongruous with Vulcan tastes. Matza is an exception.” He reaches across the desk and snaps off half a piece of the flatbread. “Also, my maternal grandmother was Jewish. We visited her occasionally when I was a child, and I developed a taste for it.”

Uhura takes another bite and washes it down with the last of her tea. “Did you spend a lot of time on Earth when you were growing up?”

“Less as I grew older. But yes, when I was very young. My mother still keeps a house outside of Seattle. It belonged to my grandfather.” He looks away from her eyes, at the chessboard. “It has been many years since I have seen it.”    
   
Not for the first time, she wants to push him, to ask questions until he gives voice to the words he is so carefully not saying. Instead, she follows his example and looks down at the chessboard. “You should go see the house,” she says softly. “If you miss it.” 

He straightens slightly in his chair. “I believe it is your move, Ms. Uhura.”

She takes his pawn, and the game continues. 

++

When Uhura was small, her father was a conductor for a symphony in Mombasa. They hired him because he was a genius, and fired him because he threatened to shove a French horn into one of the more remote parts of the symphony director’s anatomy. Most of her father’s jobs ended this way, with a lot of shouting and dramatic threats of violence from old men with artistic temperaments. Uhura was used to it; she spent the long nights of her childhood in the audience of a darkened rehearsal hall, finishing her schoolwork by the light of her PADD as her father railed against the three things that enraged him above all else: arrogance, stupidity, and wasted talent.

But what she remembers best about the Mombasa symphony is the day her father led her past her seat in the audience and brought her onto the stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Hasan Uhura said to his orchestra, “this is my daughter. She has yet to begin formal musical training, she’s refused to eat anything other than tuna fish sandwiches for the last two weeks, and her idea of great theatre involves a man in a rabbit costume dancing a jig with his fellow cheery woodland creatures. She is six years old, and she is going to sit in this chair, listen to you as you play, and point to whichever of you numbskulls is _ruining this piece_.”

In the end she closed her eyes – not because it made it easier to focus, but because she didn’t want to see the sour expressions on the musicians’ faces when she pointed their way: the poorly tuned viola, the second chair violinist who couldn’t keep up the pace, the piccolo player with all the spark and life of a funeral dirge. Her arm shot out almost against her will, singling out musician after musician, many of them older and more famous and even more terrifying than her father, and she was right every time.  
   
It is one of her father’s favorite stories, and when he tells it she is a hero, the pig-tailed child prodigy who saved the good name of the Mombasa Philharmonic with her remarkable ear and charming gap-toothed smile. It is her golden hour.

But when she dreams about sitting on that stage, her father isn’t there. She’s alone in a heaving jungle of woodwinds and strings and brass, lost in a riot of sound, and every time she raises her hand and points to a discordant note the cacophony grows louder and more terrible. She claps her hands over her ears and the orchestra towers over her, timpani and tubas and great bass drums throbbing in time to their awful music. She grows smaller in her chair, curling in on herself as the sound rises, swallowing her whole.

“Cadet Uhura,” Spock says, “you are dreaming.”

He stands beside her on the stage, hands folded behind his back and impossibly tall in his grey uniform. She looks up at him, hands still over her ears. “I’m not a cadet. I’m six.”

“So I see.” His lips press together for a brief moment. “I assure you that this intrusion was unintentional. You are asleep, and I observed that you were experiencing some minor respiratory distress. When I took your hand to check your pulse I inadvertently initiated a telepathic connection.”

The music grows louder; her nose wrinkles. “Minor respiratory distress?”

“Caused by your nightmare. You were…” Spock pauses. “Agitated.” He steps back, looking up at the orchestral throng surrounding them. “I should leave. You would not wish me to see this.”

She grabs his hand. “No. Don’t go.”

He stops, going completely still. He looks down at her fingers curled around his. “This is a violation of your privacy,” he says slowly. “I cannot stay.”

Her grip tightens. “They’re doing everything wrong, and I can’t make them stop. You have to make them stop.”

Spock looks again at the orchestra, which has swelled to a menacing height. Polished metal gleams under the harsh stage lights and every note hurts her, makes her teeth ache and her eyes burn. After a moment he crouches by her chair. The muscles of his jaw tense. “I do not know how to help you.”

The music is terrible; she pulls her legs to her chest and presses her face against her kneecaps. “Everything’s wrong,” she moans. “Everything’s wrong and it’s all my fault.”

“It is not,” Spock says in Swahili, a language she is sure he does not speak. “I promise you, it is not your fault.” He touches her hand, slipping her child’s fingers inside his. “Uhura, you must look at me and listen to what I say.”

She looks up and meets his eyes.

“There are some things that, once broken, cannot be mended. Errors that cannot be corrected.” He squeezes her hand. “No matter how hard we may try.”

There is silence, and the stage is empty. She is herself again, twenty-seven years old and unafraid. She is still holding his hand. “Am I asleep in your office?” she asks.

“You said you only wished to lay your head down for a moment.” The corner of his mouth rises slightly. “It has been considerably longer than a moment since you did so.”

“Oh,” she says, and wakes up.

Her head is pillowed on something soft, but the edge of the desk digs painfully into her sternum. She reaches up to rub her sleep-heavy eyes and knocks the white bishop and the black queen across the chessboard. The skin of her wrist is still warm – the echo of a touch.

She looks down at her pillow. It’s made of Vulcan wool. 

“I could be wrong,” she says, “but I think I drooled on your sweater.”

Spock stands by her side, his hands safely behind his back. “Excess saliva is an anticipated result of the human sleep cycle. I was aware of this fact when I chose the sweater to cushion your head from the hard wood of the desk.”

She slumps back in the chair. “I don’t remember that.”

“You were asleep at the time.” He pauses, delicately. “I did not wish to awaken you. Had I done so, you would have returned to your work without allowing yourself the rest you required.”

 _And here I thought Starfleet assigned you to be my advisor, not my nanny_ , Uhura thinks, biting back her irritation. Some must show on her face, however, because Spock turns abruptly and retreats behind his desk. He sits, his posture for once more rigid than refined, and it occurs to her that she’s being a little unfair. He is her instructor and she is his student, and in his mind that makes her very much his responsibility. Vulcans, she knows, are fond of responsibility; they have holidays and everything. 

She reaches up and tightens her ponytail with a good, hard tug. “I don’t suffer from some sort of crazy orchestra phobia, you know. It’s just a dream I have every once in a while.”

“Dreams are, by their nature, irrational,” Spock says, his voice perfectly even. “It is not a phenomenon one can control.” He looks down, avoiding her eyes. “I wish to apologize again for my intrusion into your thoughts. It was an unintentional violation, but a violation nonetheless. I would understand if—”

“I’m not angry, Spock.” 

He looks up. “I am aware that Humans often claim not to feel undesirable emotions, even when the most cursory observation of their emotional state would contradict this claim.”

She almost rolls her eyes. “It’s pretty unusual, isn’t it, to form a telepathic connection just by touching someone’s wrist? Particularly for someone with your mental control.”

He pauses. “The connection was a superficial one,” he says. “It was not a true meld; I encountered only the surface level of your thoughts.”

“The dream.”

“Yes. The dream.” He shifts uneasily in his chair. “Cadet Uhura—”

“My father’s a bit of a bastard,” Uhura says, folding her hands in her lap. “He’s mellowed with age, but he was worse when I was little. I mean – we’ve always been close, he was a great father in a lot of ways, but he’s not very good with people and sometimes I think that I’m the same way. That I listen to other people’s voices and only hear the dissonant notes.” She swallows and makes herself meet his eyes. “I’m not angry with you because it wasn’t a violation. It was a nightmare and I was scared and I’m pretty sure I wanted you there with me, so it wasn’t a violation.” She looks down at her hands. “So.”

There is an almost painfully awkward silence. “I must admit,” Spock says, “that I found the giant pulsing French horn to be particularly disturbing.”

Uhura grins. “Welcome to my childhood trauma.” She stands, smoothing her uniform skirt. “I should probably finish my grading and then, you know, sleep in a bed like a normal person.”

“For no fewer than eight hours,” he says. “Uninterrupted.”

“Aye aye, sir.” She gestures to the chessboard. “Thank you for the game. You should make me play again, sometime.”    

“Perhaps,” he says, and picks up his PADD and stylus, ready to continue his work. She turns to leave the office, but just as she reaches the door he says, “Ms. Uhura?”

She stops and looks over her shoulder, her hand on the doorframe. “Yes, Mr. Spock?”

He lowers the PADD. “The revisions you have made to the first two chapters of your dissertation are most impressive. I found the new evidence you presented unexpectedly convincing, and have little doubt that future revisions will prove my initial concerns unfounded.”

She exhales a long breath. “Thank you, sir.”

“I am merely giving my honest evaluation of your work. There is no need to thank me.”   

Her grip on the doorframe tightens, and she feels an inexplicable rush of affection. She pictures him carefully lifting her head from the desk, trying not to wake her as he slides his sweater beneath her cheek. She was probably snoring. 

Uhura smiles. “See you tomorrow, Commander.”

He inclines his head slightly in her direction, but his attention has already returned to his PADD. “Good evening, Cadet. Sleep well.”

Surprisingly enough, she does.


End file.
